Pre-Season Fashion Fun with Bingo

Playing wardrobe bingo to create unique ensembles

Fall 2014 is upon us, and the last of this year’s fashion seasons is soon to commence as weather starts to get chilly. However, before the Ralph Laurens, Donatella Versaces, and Michael Cincos of the world can unleash their fierce creativity on all of us, you can actually stage a pre-season designer session mock-up; and all it takes is a game of bingo to get things going.

While bingo may not seem like much to some people, the beauty of the game is that it’s highly customizable to fit virtually any theme or objective. There’s coffee shop bingo which has been making the rounds since its inaugural start in Seattle a couple of years back, and the popularity of the game has even made it so Iceland Foods in the UK has released Iceland Bingo, where players compete for discount vouchers that they can use in Iceland shops. There’s also music bingo which substitutes bingo balls with songs for some Name That Tune-style daubing; and for our purposes, there’s wardrobe bingo.

Initiated by online clothing retailer BooHoo.com last year, wardrobe bingo is a fun way to come up with fashion combos which you otherwise might not have thought about. It requires you to get five items each of tops, bottoms, footwear, and accessories; i.e. the four basic wardrobe groups. You then label each item from 1 to 5, and in true bingo fashion, randomly draw numbers to create some wild mix-and-match ensembles. You can then take pictures of them and upload them online if you want to.

As stated, bingo is all about customization, and you can up the ante of your wardrobe bingo sessions by incorporating more variables such as going strictly high-end, opting for futuristic fashion-forward pieces, increasing the number of groupings, and whatnot. It all boils down to how creative you can get with the concept.